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Speaker 1 (00:03):

Welcome to the Solarpreneur podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level. My name is Taylor Armstrong and I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fail. I teach you to avoid the mistakes I made and bringing the top solar dogs, the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro and closing more deals. What is a Solarpreneur you might ask a Solarpreneur is a new breed of solar pro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery and you are about to become one.

Speaker 2 (00:44):

The 1 thing that prevents most solar salespeople from hitting their goals and closing deals. That's what we're going to be jamming on today. That and much more coming up on today's podcast. My name's Taylor Armstrong. I'm here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully have a much better time in this great solar industry. Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, good time with your family. Hope you took the day off. That would be a good day to go and knock. Some doors hit up some people, but I hope that you can take Thanksgiving and Christmas off at least from knocking doors, but a great Turkey day. Great time with friends and family. Hopefully you enjoyed it today. We're going to be talking about something a little bit different, and I love this topic because it's something that I have a lot to learn on. So I love hearing from experts on the topic and that is the topic of finances.

Speaker 2 (01:43):

Then I'm going to tie that into what that has to do with closing deals and hitting your goals. But it's actually been a big piece. That's helped me out tremendously to close more deals is thinking more about the financial side of things. And the reason we're talking about this a little bit more right now is because if you miss the big announcement we brought on our first ever sponsors of the show, and that is our friends over at Pi Syndicate. If you hadn't noticed, we brought Jerry, if you sell him the show and he started this financial mastermind basically to help people get their mind, right? When it comes to the money piece of the puzzle. So big thank you to them. And if you want to get, you know, your finances, right, definitely hit them up. Tell them you heard about them from the podcast and they're going to hook you up.

Speaker 2 (02:37):

They're going to take care of you. So go over to Pius in the get.com. We'll post their a website in the show notes of this, go check them out, let them know you appreciate them sponsoring the show and next up. So we're gonna actually hear from their CFO, his name's Austin. And he's going to share a little bit more about their vision and goal is with Pi Syndicate. But anyways, back to the topic at hand of the show today, and so something that prevents people from closing deals more than you think is they have no financial plan in place. And I've talked about this book a lot recently, a lot of podcasts, but closer survival guide by Grant Cardone. He lists this matter of fact is one of the top 10 reasons that closers fail is they don't have a financial plan in place. And we're going to get into what exactly is a financial plan, because I didn't even know what this was when I first read it.

Speaker 2 (03:40):

It's like, what is he talking about? Financial planning. What was that to do with closing deals? So I didn't expect it. Maybe you don't expect that either, but before we talked about what is a financial plan first, I just want to mention that you need to get your head right around money. If you're like, I don't know if anyone's like me, but I had an enormous scarcity mindset around money. And most you've heard my story. I was in college at Southern Utah university. I was donating plasma to pay my rent. And basically my summers, a pest control. Didn't go as well as I hoped. So I didn't even have money to pay my rent at the time as donating plasma. And I was that kid on campus that was going to every single club event, every single thing to try and get just some free food.

Speaker 2 (04:36):

If you've been on campuses, you know, they do those events all the time where they're handing out free pizza, where there might need to come check out the clubs. I wasted so many hours go to these events, listening to pointless meetings, just because I knew there was going to be a slice of pizza at the end. That's how desperate I was. I literally did not want us want to spend a dime out of my pocket. If I knew I'd go get free food somewhere. And that was just the tip of iceberg. I was the guy that our school had this discount card it's called disturbing student heard where every single restaurant in town, then a deal for college students was mostly like, buy one, get one free burgers. Or I don't know if some sort of like bonus you got with your meal.

Speaker 2 (05:24):

Every single day I went on in college. I refuse to go to any place that was not listed on this card. So I'm like, I'm not paying a dime over what I should. I'm going to get some type of deal. I'm going to get some type of discount or else I'm not going there. So that was me pretty sad. Right. And I didn't have money. So I mean, it was driven by that. That's not like, you know, that was kind of the factors when you're broke, you do pretty crazy stuff. And the craziest thing I probably did was we even went on a, we went on a trip with some buddies freshman year at college, we decided, Hey, we're going to go out to California. We're going to go to six flags. Knott's Berry farm. I dunno, a few different places. And we went there.

Speaker 2 (06:13):

I was so broke. I was literally finding leftover concessions on people's tables at six flags. I was going around if I saw a piece of pizza or some fries that looked like they hadn't been touched, I was snagging people's foods off tables, pretty nasty. Right? So I did some extreme stuff. I was broke and this caused me just like some crazy distress. And my head caused some crazy thoughts about money that I was never going to have money. I was always going to be short on money. I was always going to be strapped for cash. So just causes an enormous scarcity mindset. And they've seen it in a few of my friends. I didn't grow up. My parents weren't broke or anything. My dad's a dentist. So, you know, upper middle class, we always have money. We always, you know, never went hungry, nothing crazy like that, but I just never really had jobs.

Speaker 2 (07:12):

I was a music major. So I was always practicing my drums, my percussion. I didn't have time to go work. So if you're like me, if you had these, if you had these types of thoughts in your head, they're likely still carried over to this day. And that's part of what I struggle with now is I still find myself having these thoughts where I don't have money. I'm not going to be able to provide for my family. I'm going to be short on cash. Okay. And it's not an issue now, but they still creep up just because it was so ingrained in my head, back in my college days and back growing up that I didn't have money to, you know, buy what I wanted. Guess this is the first step before you create a financial plan, do you get your mindset right around money?

Speaker 2 (08:05):

It's a work in progress for me, but think how can you get your mindset right around cash. Someone that I look up to a lot that talks about this topic all the time is river Skinner. He was a guest on the podcast, but he has his whole abundance kind of movement. He calls it. He's always preaching about being more abundant. He's always going to gas stations and like cheering that he's paying four or five bucks a gallon for gas. Cause he's abundant. So think how can you be more abundant? How can you get rid of those scarcity mindset, feelings around money? Because we don't do it. It's going to be holding you back in your financial goals. It's going to make it tougher to close deals. It's going to make it tougher to have success in the solar industry. So be abundance, something that helped me is just actually having physical cash, handling it these days.

Speaker 2 (09:05):

Most people don't carry on physical cash. Most people don't even look at their dollar bills, right? It's all in Venmo. It's own PayPal. It's all in cash app, whatever, but they're not seeing the physical cash. So if you can't see it, how are you going to know you have the money, right? You go look at the bank account, but something that actually helped me tremendously go, don't go get a withdrawal of actual physical cash. And I kept in an envelope for a months. I shouldn't do this again would probably help now. But something I did for months, I would get, I had a hundred dollar bill, $50 bill, $200 bill, $10 bill. I would take them out and I would physically handle them every day. And I would just envision myself having extra cash. I would envision myself never being short on that money.

Speaker 2 (10:00):

I was handling in my hand and I was doing affirmations around it. So try that, go print out some physical data. Can you print it out, but go withdraw some physical cash, have it in an envelope and maybe get your mind, get your mind wrapped around that you have an abundance of cash. Is that step number one, make sure you get your mind right around money. And then step number two is get that financial plan in place. Ok, game Grant Cardone talks about this as one of the reasons why closers still, they don't have the plan in place. So if you have the book, it's step number seven, it's on page 66. He talks about this and go read the whole thing if you want. He just has a couple pages on it, but just to summarize it, he talks at the end, say most people correctly estimate their financial needs or never created a financial plan at all.

Speaker 2 (11:04):

Get a financial plan today and make sure it is going to do more than pay the bills, but also create financial freedom for you in your household, you will start closing more deals and you'll quit underestimating the amount of effort, energy, and enthusiasm. It takes to get a deal closed. The bottom line is this. If you underestimate what it takes to create real financial freedom, then it only makes sense that you will underestimate what it takes to close a deal. Mike drop right there. Right? And I can personally test to this. One of the recent best months of sales that I had recently is we were investing in this rental property. Is some of you that follow me over on Instagram. I talked about how we're getting a rental property for an Airbnb over in Utah. And that month I just had this excitement like, man, I want to go out and create this money so I can put it towards that property.

Speaker 2 (12:03):

In that month I had, I think it was 14 deals closed 13, 14, where the previous months I always had, I was closing, I don't know, 6, 7, 8, but I had that extra level of excitement that I was putting my money towards something that I was excited about towards an investment for my future can that's part of having a financial plan in place is your planning for how you're going to create extra income in your planning. Then miss Mintz, you're going to make with that extra income, you're planning your future with it. You're not just paying the bills. And you think of these companies that just cut costs, cut costs, cut costs, just strict budget that you'll also follow these people like Dave Ramsey, Susie Orman, who followed me into Cornell. And he bashed on them all the time because what do they talk about? They talk about just living by a super strict budget, cutting costs, cutting, chopping up your credit cards, right?

Speaker 2 (13:01):

And just, you know, live in his slim as you can. But I think it's super powerful, especially in sales, go out and close more deals to create your financial freedom, right? I want to live like a king and have extra money from my investments. And obviously, you know, there's a balance from it. You know, I'm going to go bolt insane amounts of money. You shouldn't be dropping thousands of dollars at the club every weekend, right? So within reason, but think how can you create that extra income to live, how you want to live and then have that extra money for your investments. So I think the first step in creating that financial plan is yes, figure out how much money you need to live. It. You do want to figure out what is your budget? What exactly you're going to do? You know, how much money do you need to live, right?

Speaker 2 (13:57):

And how much money do you need to fund future retirement plans, vacations children's education, all that, stuff like that. And then second Grant Cardone talks about this. Figure out how much money you actually need to bring in monthly in order to create solvency and get all that you want accomplished, which solvent seat is the ability of an entity to pay its debts with available cash. So your financial plan should include clearly state and monetary goals. Exactly how you're going to create surpluses of money, what to do with the surpluses and investments. So this is very important. Go and write down, have your financial plan written down. How much do you need to live? Hey, you should be doing that. If you haven't done that, go track, you know, figure out all your exact expenses, figuring out how much you need to live to put a week each month, but then figure out what is your surplus.

Speaker 2 (14:55):

So how much surplus do you want to have each month? What are you going to do with that? Write down your investments in this goes into why I think joining something like Pi Syndicates is a great idea because if you don't know, if you're like me, you don't know what 10 miss your money in it all. I'll be honest. I am not a financial group. I'm not good with investments. And that's why I never invested really in the past. That's why it still can meet, taken me until now to get my first rental properties, because I just thought, oh, I don't know where to look. I don't know. I don't know how to tell if this is a good deal or if it's going to cash flow. But if you can be around a group of people who know what they're doing, a mastermind style, like Pi Syndicate guys that have, you know, multi-multi millionaires that you know, have tons of different investments that are super successful.

Speaker 2 (15:55):i

That's going to jumpstart the process. So that's why I decided to have them as the sponsor for the show is because so many people in this industry, they can make money, but what are they doing with it? And are they paying all the uncle, Sam, if that's the other thing, that's super powerful joining pipes. And they get, you're going to learn how to actually take that money. You would be given to uncle Sam and investing it and avoiding what you would probably paying taxes otherwise. So that's the two big steps of the day. And this is why a lot of people felt you don't have a financial plan. So today, wherever you are after your workout, after your ride out to area, wherever you're listening to this, sometime today, take out your notes app, take out a pad of paper, write down what is your financial plan?

Speaker 2 (16:48):

How much do you need to have the live every month? And then how much surplus are you going to have every month? What are you going to do with that? Write it out, get it in front of you, slap it on the mirror, put it on a vision board. If you're into that stuff, I think is super cool to have maybe print out a picture to go with it. And then that's how you're going to create this excitement. I guarantee you, if you do this, it's going to motivate you to push harder and deals than you were before. And something that I feel like I became a better closer when I had a kid actually just had my second kid. Now, when I'm in deals, I know, okay. I want to feed my kids. I want to know on for my kids' future. So it allows me to push harder to hang in deals longer than I would otherwise it's.

Speaker 2 (17:40):

So what's that motivation that you have? What stage you're in, how are we going to create that extra motivation to push hard in those deals? Yeah. You're not going to be pulling people's teeth, but you're going to stick in that deal and this is the way to do it. So that's the topic of today. Make sure you get your mind right around your buddy. And then step two, have that financial plan in place. It's going to change your game in solar. I promise you. So let me know what you think of this topic. Let me know if you like these financial topics. Next episode, we're going to have Austin on the show. He's going to dive in a little more. He's the expert on this stuff. So you're gonna hear from him. So don't miss out and get your finances, right? Close. Some deals deals this week and we will see you on the next episode. Peace.

Speaker 3 (18:32):

Hey, Solarpreneurs quick question. What if you could surround yourself with the industry's top performing sales pros, marketers, and CEOs, and learn from their experience and wisdom in less than 20 minutes a day. For the last three years, I've been placed in the fortunate position to interview dozens of elite level solar professionals and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level. That's why I want to make a truly special announcement about the new learning community, exclusively for solar professionals to learn, compete, and win with top performers in the industry. And it's called the Solciety, this learning community with designed from the ground up to level the playing field to give solar pros access to proven members who want to give back to this community and help you or your team to be held accountable by the industry. Brightest minds four, are you ready for it? Less than $3 and 45 cents a day currently Solciety is open, launched, and ready to be enrolled. So go to Solciety.co To learn more and join the learning experience. Now this is exclusively for Solarpreneur listeners. So be sure to go to solciety.co and join. We'll see you on the inside.